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EICAR 2014

On the 17th and 18th November the 23rd EICAR conference was held in Frankfurt. Various topics were discussed, and six members of the Institute for Legal Informatics gave presentations about their current research projects.

Prof. Forgó gave a presentation about the MAPPING project (Managing Alternatives for Privacy, Property and Internet Governance). After a brief introduction of the Institute and its work, some quick facts about the project and the three main areas of research Internet Governance, Privacy and Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) were presented. As the IRI will co-ordinate the research/activities in the focus area Privacy-Economy-Security, the presentation then focused on issues regarding this area. MAPPINGs approach is to bring together various stakeholders in order to get a joined-up understanding on current issues. Therefore, various experts had been invited to different MAPPING events in the last few months in order to discuss the status quo. Accordingly, a first overview on the outcome of those events was given. The presentation of the status quo was finally followed by a reality check, comparing the legal situation to what actually happens.

Iheanyi Samuel Nwanko (IRI) and his partner Elias Neri (Custodix) presented their project CHIC (Computational Horizons In Cancer) under the title “Providing a Network of Trust in Processing Health Data for Research”. CHIC is a legal data protection framework for processing and protecting (very) sensitive health data. The project supports research by providing medical data which is secured through pseudonymisation and anonymisation. Therefore the researchers are able to work with a huge amount of real medical data without a possibility to identify the persons behind the data. With one exception: In case of e.g. an incidental finding there is a need of informing the patient. In that case the doctor is able to get the information through a de-pseudonymsation.

Alan Dahi und Ioannis Revolidis (both IRI) held a presentation about “Data Cube Anonymisation” and compared the Data Privacy Laws in the EU, Australia and America. At the beginning they introduced their project “Linked2Safety” which provides a technical solution to support research within the Data Protection Laws. In the USA there is no concrete and comprehensive legislation which covers information privacy while there are some laws which protect medical data. In Australia there is the Privacy Act 1988 which defines “personal information” as information about an individual which is at least reasonably identifiable. The EU is currently defining “personal data” as “information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person” under the Data Protection Directive.

Dr. Stefan Rüping (Fraunhofer IAIS) and Magdalena Goralczyk (IRI) spoke about their project EURECA under the title “Big data – technical possibilities and legal consequences on an example of medical data”. EURECA (Enabling information re-Use by linking clinical REsearch and Care) is an EU-FP7 funded project. It aims to “bridging the gap between data for care and for healthcare” and thereby offering better health care and improving research.

Jonathan Stoklas (IRI) introduced the EVIDENCE project under the title “Legal Issues around Digital Evidence – a first overview”. The project deals with the problem of many different laws covering digital evidence within the EU. It aims to harmonise the legislation in Europe by creating a road map and guidelines that would enable the setup of a Common European Framework for the regulation and standardisation of electronic evidence gathering and exchange.In a first step, a definition for “digital evidence” has to be found. The presentation then focused on some particular issues related to digital evidence, such as cloud computing, computer-assisted search or data retention.

At the end of the EICAR conference Rainer Fahs, Chairman of EICAR, thanked all referents for the very exciting and informative presentations. He also proclaimed that he’s already looking forward to the EICAR conference 2015.